Learning towards a circular ecosystem: Designing ecological education for circularity

This chapter aims to combine the ecological approach to circularity and education through a critical dialogue as well as reflections on empirical experimentation with circular-oriented ecosystem innovation in formal higher education. It explores the discourse on circular ecosystems as well as ecologies of learning and proposes a conceptual framework for an ecological approach to education for the circular economy based on both discourses. The chapter then describes the methodology, the workshops that were used for the development of circular thinking, as well as the Living Spiral Framework, which was used as the method for translating the experimentation observations and reflections in relation to the conceptual framework. Ecologies of learning could be conceived as the interrelations between educational design, learning, place and action that nurture the emergence of continuously more circular ecosystems. To ground and understand the concept of circular ecosystems, a definition of ecosystems in the ecological sense is required.